- why does my actual loading animation not play right away? it is on the first frame of my preloader but it seems to get locked up for several seconds. do i need to reorganize my preloader?
- when i test my movie on the intRAnet it works fine, BUT when i view it on the intERnet some loaded swf files do not appear at all. UNLESS i go to a different page on the flash site and come back to that problem page.
The preloader has to be part of the loaded files. You should open one and check it in test movie with the View/Bandwidth Profiler and the View/Streaming Graph options checked. Check out how big the first frame is. Remember, the first frame has to load before it can play, even if it is a preloader.
I've had the problem with the loading animation not showing up, and the whole external movie hanging up and not loading. I was using a simple preloader script, which seemed to be the problem. It was set to play the movie at 80% load, but didn't work right till I set it to 100%. Maybe that's your problem.
You should put everything in it's own layer, including code, put that in an actions layer. But, your trying to preload something more than once in that single movie. You can't do that. See, for each movie, once it starts to load, and that includes the preloader, once it starts, it isn't going to stop to load more, it's just going to load the whole thing.
Rather than try and explain, here's a fla to look at. It has 2 scenes, one for the preloader and one for the content. If you use this for your main movie, use it as is, if it's for an external swf that your going to load into another movie, change the part that says _root in the first two lines, to 'this', [no quotes]. You need MX to open tho.
You mean the content for the movie? The loader you got has 2 scenes, one named Preloader and one named Scene 1. Put all your stuff in scene 1. Get to that from that little edit scene icon above the stage panel, on the right side.
No, the preloader will load scene 1, then jump to scene 1 by itself. However.... When you test movie, you won't normally see a preloader. Once you are in test movie, [Ctrl + Enter], hit ctrl + enter agaian. That will start the preloader scene and play it through and jump to the regular scene.
But I'm a little confused about what you got. More images in scene 1? Scene 1 should BE your main site. Unless you are loading this preloader and it's scene 1 into another movie.
How do you name a scene preloader? I'm trying to make a site from flash, and I can't get a preloader on it. I downloaded your sample loader, but the preload scene is called preloader. How do you name it that so it will comebefore scene 1? Can someone maybe edit my site so it will work well and quickly when I publish it?
You don't really have to name it Preloader, it's just for convienience. But to do it, go to Window/Scene. In the little popup panel, just click the one you want to rename, twice, slow. Then rename it. You can also drag the scenes up or down in there to make them come before or after others in the list.
okie doke, this makes sense now. so, if you visit this site again, will it be cached? or will i have to sit and watch the preloader again? my swf file is like 400k and on a 56k it takes a minute to load.
If they turned off the computer or even closed the browser, it'll probably empty the cache, so they need to load it again.
Are we talking 400K for the main movie? Way too big normally. You could rebuild and load some of the content as separate swf file into your main movie. That's the accepted way for large sites. Then the main site will load faster and depending on if they actually click a button to view something else, then that something else will load from a separate file, and can have it's own little preloader if you want.
If your talking intro that takes up a large chunk of that 400K, then you can put the intro on one page, as a separate movie, and then go to the next page which would hold the main movie when the intro is done. In that case, there is some simple action script that will allow them to skip the intro the next visit and go right to the main. Check out my WWW button below and see how it all works.